Comment spam, lewd advertising, and stolen assets abound for Evony
by Seraphina Brennan 
Jul 13th 2009 at 6:00PM
Filed under: Fantasy, Business models, Culture, MMO industry, Free-to-play, MMORTS
If you've been on the internet for longer than five minutes then you've probably run into ads for Evony, an online free-to-play browser real-time strategy game. The game is a medieval MMORTS, but you probably wouldn't be able to figure that out from some of their recent advertisements, most of which center around lingerie and women.The game's unorthodox marketing strategy has been a target of the blogosphere for some time, starting back when they were still called Civony instead of their current title. During that time the company was caught by bloggers for stealing images without permission from other sites and using them for their game's marketing. Since then, the name has changed and new advertising has appeared, including an overuse of blog comment spam.
Interestingly enough, the company has denounced the use of spam amongst their users of the iEvony codes, calling it a "unethical" and "abusive."
The company may have more to worry about than just poor taste in marketing, as many sites are also noting that the game's art assets and writing assets have been ripped from other real-time strategy games. Things such as text from Civilization 4 to the castle sprites from Age of Empires have been found in the game, creating the feeling for some users that this developer, whoever it is, is not entirely on the legitimate side.
